WooCommerce Tutorial: Everything You Need To Launch A Store

Colin Newcomer

1 year ago

Are you looking to create an eCommerce store with WooCommerce? If so, you’re making a great decision! But you might need help getting started with the nitty-gritty details of actually installing and configuring a working WooCommerce store.

If that sounds like you – then you’re the perfect person to be reading this WooCommerce tutorial.

I’ll cover everything that you need to do to get started with WooCommerce while providing lots of screenshots so that you can easily follow along. There’s a lot to cover so let’s get started!

Why WooCommerce Is The Right Tool To Launch An eCommerce Store on WordPress

According to BuiltWith, WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform among the 10,000 most visited websites in the world at 11% market share. If you expand that search to the entire Internet, that number shoots up to a dominant 42% market share.

Needless to say, there are a lot of WooCommerce stores built on WooCommerce…

So what makes WooCommerce so popular? Here are a few of the main reasons people love WooCommerce:

Powered by WordPress. That means you get access to the massive third-party theme and plugin ecosystems that all the other WordPress sites get.

Flexible. Tying with the previous point, you can find a plugin to help you do pretty much anything that you want.

Self hosted. While self-hosting does require more attention, it also gives you 100% control over your store and all its data.

Easy to find help. Because of WordPress and WooCommerce’s popularity, it’s easy to find both free support forums as well as talented developers.

So if you’re ready to launch an eCommerce store with WooCommerce, let’s finish up the why and start digging into the how to!

What You’ll Learn In This WooCommerce Tutorial

Here’s everything that you’ll learn in this guide:

Where to find a nice WooCommerce compatible WordPress theme

How to configure WooCommerce’s basic settings with its install wizard

How to create your very first WooCommerce product

Why (and how) to set up some WooCommerce payment gateways (using Stripe as an example)

Where to poke around to configure other smaller WooCommerce settings

How to manage things like orders, coupons, and reports

Basically, if you follow this WooCommerce tutorial you should be able to go from “zero” to “fully functioning WooCommerce store” in no time.

Step 0: Choose Solid WordPress Hosting So Your Store Runs Fast

Hosting is an important consideration for your WooCommerce store for two reasons:

Once you have a solid foundation to build your WooCommerce store on, you’re ready to move on.

Step 1: Choose A WooCommerce-Compatible WordPress Theme

Before you start installing and configuring WooCommerce, you want to choose a WooCommerce-compatible WordPress theme that will set you up for success.

While most themes nowadays come with WooCommerce support built-in, it’s still not universal. WooCommerce should still run with any WordPress theme – but if your theme doesn’t have built-in compatibility, your store might end up:

Ugly

Hard to use

Buggy

That’s the last thing that you want when you’re trying to sell products!

Step 3: Payment Tab

In the Payment tab, you can choose to activate some basic payment gateways:

Stripe – lets you accept credit and debit card payments

PayPal – lets you get paid via any PayPal method

Honestly – this tab isn’t too important right now because you:

Can easily change these settings later

Can access 100+ other payment gateways later on

Still need to complete further setup to get the payment gateways working

So basically – don’t stress too much right now. If you’re not sure which payment gateway you want to use, leaving it as the default of Stripe is totally fine for now:

When you’re done, click Continue.

Step 4: Shipping Tab

In the Shipping tab, you can set up:

How to calculate shipping fees

Which weight and dimension units to use

Most of the time, you should leave these as the defaults. But if you don’t want to calculate live shipping rates, you can also choose to use:

Flat Rate

Free Shipping

Once you make your choice, click Continue.

Step 5: Extras Tab

Taxes can get complicated – so if you don’t want to deal with figuring out how to calculate them by yourself, you can activate Automated Taxes in the Extras tab.

With this, WooCommerce will automatically install the free WooCommerce Services plugin so that it can automatically charge the correct tax rate when a customer checks out.

You don’t have to use this, but I think it’s helpful so I’ll enable it:

Click Continue when you make your choice.

Step 6: Activate Tab

Assuming you chose to:

Calculate live shipping rates

Automatically calculate tax rates

Then you’ll need to connect your website to the Jetpack plugin to continue. Jetpack is built by Automattic, the same company behind WooCommerce, so this is totally safe to do.

Just click Connect with Jetpack and follow the prompts:

Once you finish – that’s it! You should see a screen telling you that You’re ready to start selling!

Next up – it’s time to start creating some products!

Step 3: Create Your First WooCommerce Product

While you’ll still need to complete a few more configuration steps before you’re ready to start selling, at this point you have a mostly functional eCommerce store that you can start adding products to.

To create a new WooCommerce product:

Go to your WordPress dashboard

Click on Products → Add New

You should see something that looks a lot like the regular WordPress editor:

In the regular WordPress Editor boxes, you can enter the product’s:

Title

Long description (as opposed to the separate Short Description)

If you scroll down the page, you’ll get to the meat of the WooCommerce Product data.

First, choose the type of product, as well as whether or not the product is virtual and/or downloadable. This support article as a full explanation of the different product types, but most of the time you can choose the Simple product option:

Then, you can use the sidebar tabs to configure all the nitty gritty details about your product.

You’ll have different tabs depending on the type of product that you choose, but here’s how it looks for the most common Simple product:

General – covers pricing (regular and sale) as well as tax information

Inventory – lets you add an SKU and manage stock status

Shipping – lets you add dimensions for shipping as well as a custom shipping class (for grouping products)

Linked Products – this is a marketing tactic that lets you link the product to similar products for upsells and cross-sells

Attributes – lets you add custom information (called “attributes”) that is unique to the product

Advanced – lets you add a custom purchase note to customers as well as enable/disable customer reviews

Below that, you can set the Product short description.

And in the sidebar, you can:

Add categories and tags for your product

Add the main product image

Add a gallery of product images

Once you fill out all of the information, you’re ready to Publish your product.

Put it all together, and you should get something like this on the front-end:

Notice the difference between the long and short description?

At this point – you’re ready to rinse and repeat the process for additional products.

Step 4: Set Up WooCommerce Payment Gateways

Ok, at this point your store is 99% functioning. You have products and people will be able to add those products to their cart and start the checkout process, but they won’t be able to check out because you haven’t configured your payment gateway(s) yet.